Another commission joins the gallery. Thanks to the patience of my commissioner, I was able to take my time with her. She looked so simple but gave me a lot of trouble because both cast and fitting were pretty bad. Even after I started painting, large gaps popped up and it took even longer. Yes, she's not perfect (but then again no figure ever is) but I think she turned out decently enough. It doesn't look like it but in fact she's super huge. She alone can fill an entire Detolf department with not much space left.

This is one of the kits I've always wanted (even before picking up painting GKs as a hobby). The sculptor Abira is really talented and has produced a bunch of Toradora (among others) figures that I all love to have. So more are bound to follow if I can ever get my hands on some kits of his!

Taiga here was painted using Mr. Hobby Colors and I especially like how her dress turned out. The many layers of frills have a little purple shading on them. I'm happy that it seems like I'm rally improving. 🙂 Usually I stick to round acrylic transparent bases but this time I sort of copied the background colors of the original artwork that belongs to this kit.

My latest figure acquisition is Kotobukiya's 1/8 scale Makise Kurisu from Steins; Gate which arrived this morning. I do feel a bit guilty for not having followed the series this season but it's on my plan to watch list for later. I took a little more time for doing the photos and it wouldn't be quite as bad if I wasn't too lazy to iron the background o/ (I'll do that next time).

How can people wait to take a photo of their monthly loot? Whenever a packet arrives I want to rip it open right away.

Here's some half-assed pictures of unpacking Youmu (still trying to figure out how to handle the camera and all). I was in hurry that day which didn't help and I'm not very patient with blogging now (exam and paper deadline in a week! I've tried to push everything behind that date that could be delayed so workload is not gonna stop anytime soon). We actually have been trying out a lot of new things lately but we were mostly too lazy do document everything. Hopefully we can do that later sometime.

A common problem with most of the figure display case solutions out there is lighting - how do you put enough (and nice) light in your display so the figures look good but the whole place doesn't get filled by bulky bulbs, PSUs, cables and the like. We like to show a method of building cheap yet good looking lighting for custom glass displays as well as the common and popular IKEA DETOLF using inexpensive led-strips.

Also, as we (and probably many many others) like to use plain glass shelfs (as they're easy to mount and look good) to display figures there is the very common problem of dust and dirty laying down on the figures. The other thing we propose here is a nice method to build sturdy yet good looking glass cover you can simply place on the shelf over the figures (a box with two open sides: backside and bottom).

For building and setup instructions for those two cool concepts, please look inside :).

here comes part two of the "custom modelkit/figure display" series (or whatever you'd call it). A custom display for figures, modelkits, whatever - you name it! It's a crossover between a glass-case/cabinet and a shelf. It combines the idea of hanging it on the wall with a glass-case so the figures/GKs don't collect too much dust. This time - unfortuneatly - i don't have pictures of the quality and detail of the other tutorials, but i will try to describe the working parts as good as possible.

There are days where you just have to do some handicraft to finish the day in a nice way - so was today (and yesterday, but yesterday nothing worked, so fu yesterday, today worked out nice!). What we did is a - specifically our first - custom figure display. Its a kind of picture frame for a Rakka which lies cozily on a feather-bed.

It all started with the Konata Figma that I wanted to have and no matter how hard I looked for her, she wasn't available anywhere (you can always try eBay but in most cases you pay a high price). As ridiculous as it may sound but competition between figure collectors is fierce. Popular figures are gone in no time and people are capable of hogging sites at 4 am in the morning to get limited ones.
From what I've seen, it's easier to get figures when they're available for preorder if you really want them. Of course you can hope for sales (and they happen a lot!) but most probably those for sale aren't the ones you want.